The brother calls it a gay-hate murder. The boyfriend wonders if police were right, after all, and it was suicide. The detective has been dumped from the case. Rick Feneley reports on the hostilities behind a 27-year mystery.

Days after Scott Johnson plunged to his death from a cliff on Sydney's North Head, the two most important men in his life – his brother and his lover – were driving to see a funeral director. Behind the wheel was the boyfriend, whose name can't be published for legal reasons. In his account to police almost 25 years later, he recalled Steve Johnson's fury as they travelled along the Pacific Highway in December 1988. "I remember him thumping with his fist on the dashboard, calling me a liar and telling me that I was on the cliff with Scott …"

The boyfriend, a musicologist, had a strong alibi. He had been in Melbourne. Steve Johnson, however, did harbour suspicions that the boyfriend might be hiding something about his younger brother, Scott, a 27-year-old American mathematics prodigy who had been completing his PhD in Australia.

The last family photo of Scott Johnson, who fell to his death from North Head in 1988.Credit:NSW Police

Two spear fishermen found Scott's naked body at the base of the cliff near Blue Fish Point, just south of Manly, on December 10, 1988. Steve Johnson flew in from the US to deal with the tragedy. He was immediately confronted by the police conclusion that it was suicide. What's more, it was a "ritual suicide", he recalls Constable Troy Hardie telling him, given that Scott had been naked and his clothes were folded neatly on the clifftop.

Steve Johnson didn't buy it. Nor did Scott's partner, or at least he didn't then. Scott had no reason to kill himself, his long-term boyfriend told police. Just three months later, Coroner Derrick Hand made a formal finding of suicide.

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Steve Johnson with Clover Moore in the 2013 Mardi Gras Parade in Sydney.

Soon after that first inquest, the boyfriend went to North Head and, by speaking to men there, discovered the area where Scott died was a gay beat, a place where homosexuals met for casual and often anonymous sex.

The head of the police investigation, Detective Sergeant Doreen Cruickshank, had advised the coroner precisely the opposite. The area was not frequented by gay men, she told Hand. If it had been, she reasoned, police would have known because it would also have been frequented by people who disliked gays and who would "assault them or rob them or cause them some harm".

Today the NSW Police Force accepts that Cruickshank, the longest-serving policewoman in the state, got it wrong. It was indeed a gay beat. And yet the consequences of her flawed advice are not a subject for analysis in a 439-page police report on the re-investigation of Scott Johnson's death.

Its author, Detective Chief Inspector Pamela Young of the Unsolved Homicide Unit, spent about two years on Strike Force Macnamir before handing her report to State Coroner Michael Barnes, who will launch an extraordinary third inquest into the case on July 1.

Scott Johnson, about four months before he fell to his death from Sydney's North Head.

Young's report gives most weight to Cruickshank's original theory, suicide. It dismisses Steve Johnson's belief that Scott was murdered amid an epidemic of gay-hate crimes in the late 1980s and early '90s.

Young was dumped from the investigation in April last year at Barnes' request. The State Coroner feared she had undermined public confidence in her impartiality when she gave a remarkably candid interview to the ABC's Lateline, on the same day he announced the fresh inquest. Young accused former police minister Mike Gallacher of "kowtowing" to the Johnsons and putting pressure on police to give priority to their case over hundreds of other unsolved deaths, a claim Gallacher hotly denied.

Steve Johnson outside Glebe Coroner's Court where a third inquest into the death of his brother Scott will be held in 2016.
Credit:Nick Moir

Steve Johnson was back in Sydney this week for a directions hearing, and to hear his senior counsel, John Agius, tell Barnes that the family would prefer the investigation be stripped from NSW police because the state force had demonstrated "so much bias as it could only infect the coronial process". The family at least wanted it taken from the Unsolved Homicide Unit but they will have to settle for three fresh detectives assigned to the case by Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione, who rejects the bias charge.

It was Scott's partner who first suggested the gay murder possibility to Steve Johnson. He suddenly contacted Johnson in 2005 to alert him about the news of gay-bashing gangs and a fresh coronial finding of murders on the Bondi-Tamarama cliffs in the late 1980s.

The two brothers, Scott Johnson (right) and Steve Johnson, at the Swiss-Italian border with the Matterhorn in the background in 1984.

Deputy State Coroner Jacqueline Milledge​ condemned the "lacklustre", "disgraceful" and "shameful" police investigations that concluded two gay men, John Russell and Ross Warren, had fallen accidentally to their deaths. She found Russell was thrown to his death, that Warren – although his body was never found – was also murdered, and that missing gay Frenchman Gilles Mattaini likely met a similar fate.

Might the same thing have happened to Scott, his former boyfriend wondered? Steve Johnson, a self-made IT millionaire, has since spent about $1 million on his own investigation. He campaigned successfully for a second inquest, which in 2012 threw out the original suicide ruling and replaced it with an open finding – that Scott might have fallen, jumped or been pushed.

Johnson handed Strike Force Macnamir a list of more than 50 people of interest, including "known and suspected gay bashers". But Scott's boyfriend became torn. While he has declined to speak to Fairfax Media, 62 pages of Young's report are devoted to his interview with police in March 2013, in which he painfully accepted all possibilities, including that Scott may have killed himself out of guilt over an infidelity.

He found it improbable that Scott was alone at the gay beat or that he would have been "walking around naked by himself". And: "I still think that's a real possibility – that Scott was either lured there or he went intentionally there or he went and met somebody, or he stumbled across it on one of his walks and, and something happened."

But he added what he called some bare facts: "You can have an accident at a beat. You can suicide at a beat … You can go there seeking sex with somebody and be so full of remorse afterwards, or disgust, that you then suicide … these all seem to me to be possible explanations."

John Agius, for the family, this week questioned how much disgust and remorse Scott was feeling. Agius revealed a fresh witness had come forward to police, all these years later, to disclose he had an affair with Johnson before his death. Scott apparently had "no difficulty" with this fling, which "decimated" a keystone of the police suicide theory.

In 2011, the boyfriend cut off communication with Steve Johnson. "I was sick to death of him making accusations to me and I simply have not responded to any of his emails." Johnson's accusations, he said, included that he had fabricated a story about Scott calling him from the US in 1985 and admitting he had almost jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge.

Scott, he recalled, had been distressed about a casual sexual encounter and his mistaken belief he may have contracted AIDS. He gave this information to police after Johnson died, although Scott had told him he couldn't go through with it and his boyfriend took this as an assurance that he was incapable of suicide.

He also claimed that Scott – "scarily close" to Steve and craving his approval – was deeply hurt that his big brother had struggled to accept he was gay. Steve Johnson rejected this notion in his own meeting with police in 2013.

Out of respect for the coronial process, Johnson says, he will not engage in a slanging match with his brother's former boyfriend. "I am thankful" he adds, for his role in alerting him to the 2005 inquest and "steadfastly maintaining that what happened to the victims at Bondi was likely what happened to Scott, and for urging me to pursue an investigation".

"Whether or not four years before his death Scott briefly contemplated throwing himself from the Golden Gate Bridge... much had changed in Scott's life …

"On the day of his death, Scott had been informed that his work in higher mathematics would secure his doctorate. I believe that he would have been extremely happy to hear this news … Indeed, that probably explains why Scott may have gone to a beat – to celebrate."

The theory deserving most police attention, Johnson argues, is that Scott was "met by one of the gangs who regularly visited the gay beats of Manly and was pushed, chased or suddenly frightened off the cliff". Young's report, he says, is "full of interviews with professed or convicted gay bashers from the northern beaches in the 1980s".

Released by the coroner with names redacted, the report does include tantalising detail about former gay-bashing tribes such as the Narrabeen Skinheads. Witness 14 recalls watching a boxing match at a club with a group who boasted of their gay-bashing exploits from Surry Hills to a gay beach at Manly, and while walking on a track they found "a man lying naked in a little clearing ... We jumped on him and bashed the crap out of him, kicked him in the head. He was an American faggot. He got up and got away from us."

Pam Young went to North Head with a witness who came forward to declare that, as a teenager, he acted as the "bait" to attract victims for his gay-bashing mates. His friends were convicted of gay-bashing elsewhere, including at nearby Reef Beach. But Young is convinced this witness, for motives she cannot explain, is lying. She believes he and his mates never bashed anyone at the North Head beat.

Her report goes much further. Despite all the publicity generated by the Johnson family, she says, not a single victim has come forward to say he was bashed at the beat, and there is no such record at Manly Hospital. "Based on these realities," Young concludes, "it is not unreasonable to draw an inference that no crimes of personal violence occurred at the North Head gay beat and certainly none that required medical treatment."

Just how reasonable that remark is will be a critical question for State Coroner Barnes. Young's critics say it ignores a reality of the times: victims commonly refused to report attacks because they did not want to "come out" as gay, or they did not want to admit they were at a beat, or they simply did not trust police.

An independent examination by the NSW Crime Commission found Young's investigation was thorough and did not omit any obvious line of inquiry. Young likewise vouches for the police work on Scott Johnson's death in 1988. Asked on Lateline whether the original investigation was flawed, she replied: "Not at all. It was to the standard of the day."

If police of the day had acknowledged they were dealing with a gay beat, and told the first coroner as much, would Michael Barnes be preparing for this third inquest more than 27 years later?

Rick Feneley is a news and features writer for The Sydney Morning Herald. His column, Then Again, appears on Saturdays. He was the paper's long-term night editor before returning to writing in late 2008.